Sascha
by The Little Things In Life
Summary: After Alexandra Udinov's parents were brutally murdered, she was sold into sex-slavery. Now going by the name of Sascha, every day will be a battle for survival for this girl with a secret. She and her friends are struggling to survive the long journey to the USA and plotting to escape. What are their lives like? And will all of them make it across the ocean? ENTIRE CH.8 UP NOW
1. Meeting The Boss

**As promised! The improved version of my very first fic! It's about Alex's life before Nikita, but after Operation Pale Fire. English is not my first language, so please tell me if you find any errors. REVIEWS ARE LOVE!**

**I don't own anything, sadly...**

**Enjoy!**

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The girl quivered as she hid behind the old pieces of cloth. She didn't understand who the men were or what they were doing there. Her Papa's old driver, Ilya, had told her absolutely nothing, only that they were going to 'take care of her'. What the hell did he even mean by that? It could never be good, because the leader of the two looked extremely scary. He looked a bit like one of the bad guys from the American movies that her Papa had never allowed her to watch, when he was still – The girl broke her line of thought there. She knew she'd break down crying if she thought about her father too much and of course, she couldn't show tears. She couldn't. Crying equaled weakness, and weakness was something your enemies and rivals would always use against you if you gave them the chance. Or so her Papa had taught her all her life.

She refocused on what was going on in the room, although she couldn't make out a lot from where she was hiding. In fact, all she could see was one of the men giving Ilya a thick wad of money. _Oh my God, he sold me! He sold me to them!_ She cringed as the realization of what had just happened set in.. She knew enough about this kind of shady business to have at least a vague idea of who these men were, and what they were probably going to do with her.

Ilya walked toward her hiding place. She looked at him with fear evident on her face. She tried to hide it, but she failed. Mentally slapping herself, she thought back to one of the lessons her Papa had worked so hard to teach her.

_Do not show your enemies your fear, Alexandra. They will see it, and they will use it against you._ Never before had she fully understood how true the lesson was – and how hard it was to live up to it.

Ilya knelt in front of her.

"I cannot hide you anymore. Dangerous men are searching for you, and whoever is sheltering you!" At least he had the decency to sound apologetic. Looking at the men that gave Ilya money, she shyly asked him who they were. Not that she actually expected an answer. He might not even know their real names. Just as she had thought, Ilya avoided the question.

"These men don't know who you are."

"Are they taking me to safety?" Not that she believed they would. She just wanted to be lied to for a little while longer. She just wanted Ilya to fool her into thinking that she would be safe, that everything would be okay... but he didn't. Instead, he looked at her has if he regretted something.

"Your life will be safe...", he half-whispered.

_Well, that's reassuring. Thanks a bunch._ The sarcastic, angry answer was on the tip of her tongue and she would've said too, it if not for the fact that she didn't have the energy to be angry anymore.

Sick and tired of being scared and angry, the girl finally gave up trying to deny what was happening. She looked at Ilya accusingly. "You sold me to them, didn't you? I saw it!"

He tried to explain. "I have children of my own to feed. If I wanted to sell you to the highest bidder, I'd have gone to the new head of Zetrov and you'd be dead by now!"

That sentence made her sad. She remembered seeing her Papa fall, dying, saying her name with his last breath.

'_Alexandra.._.'

Alexandra looked down, at the last thing she had to remember him by. His old watch. She stroked it with her thumb, drawing comfort from the cool gold. Her movement caught Ilya's eye, as he looked down at it too and then back at her eyes.

"Put that thing away. People will wonder who it belongs to. Don't tell anyone you're a Udinov. It will be a death sentence for you, and anyone who ever knew you."

Ilya gave her time to hide it in her sock but before she knew it he had yanked her out of her hiding place and steered her towards the men. The leader looked at her and smirked.

"You must be Sascha," he drawled. He had a heavy Russian accent, which made her wonder why he even spoke in English. For all he knew, she was a peasant girl who might not even speak the language. "Very nice to meet you. Vlad."

And with those words, the girl finally fully understood that her life as Alexandra Udinov, heiress to a company worth a billion-dollars by the name of Zetrov and virtually a princess, was over. Her life as Sascha, just another Russian peasant girl, one of many, had begun.

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**Future chapters WILL be longer!**

**Xx**


	2. First Impressions Make All The Differenc

**Okay. What the actual fuck. I had uploaded this but fanfiction decided to hate on me and deleted it! Oh joy! So well here it is again! I bring to you... CHAPTER TWO! Yay, go party. (Oh wow that came out more sarcastic than I had intended it to. Sorry.)**

**Anyway, a huge THANK YOU for everyone who reviewed, followed and/or favorited, especially to Wootar16 for being the first to review! Love ya :3**

**And the shocker of the year: I don't own anything except Gabbe, Aliya and some other OC's. Oh and for the record, I'll be calling Alex Sascha most of the time (for now), as that is who she has to become in order to survive.**

**Enjoy!**

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"Where are you taking me?" Sascha asked. Vlad had taken her to a dark colored car, parked in the darkest spot in the parking lot. She failed to make out what color it was, because it was past 1 in the morning, so it was dark outside. Or rather her Papa's watch had read 1 am before she had hidden it in her sock.

"So you do speak English already! Good, now I won't have to get the other girls to teach you!" Sascha mentally slapped herself. _Why _was it so hard for her to just keep her big mouth shut and let him believe she was nothing but some peasant girl who didn't know the first thing about any other country that might possible exist besides Russia? "And where do you _think_ I'm taking you, Sascha? Your new home, of course!" Vlad answered. _My new home? And where would that be? That doesn't answer my question at all!_

"Where is that?" Sascha asked. Vlad didn't answer, but only smirked. When most people do that, it makes them look nicer. When Vlad did, it made him look as if he was planning an extremely painful death for her.

"You'll see. Eventually." He nodded to someone behind her, but before she could turn around, Sascha felt a sharp pain in the side of her neck. Suddenly, the world around her was a little fuzzy and the abandoned parking lot suddenly seemed a lot brighter. She closed her eyes, shying away from the sudden light, when suddenly her ears started ringing. Back when she was still Alexandra, she had seen enough movies in which people got kidnapped to know what this meant. _They drugged me!_ The world started spinning, causing her to fall to her knees. The brightness faded away a little and the colors around her started to blur and she fell through them, weightless, further and further down, through the pavement straight to the blistering heat of the Earth's core. _So this is what it feels like to be drugged? It's not that unpleasant…_

Then, she was swept away by the colorful tide once more and she didn't think much of anything for a good few hours.

When Sascha woke up, the first thing she noticed was a throbbing headache. The second thing were voices. Instead of sitting up and groaning loudly, as she would have liked to do, she kept her eyes closed and laid as still as possible._ If they think I'm still asleep, I might hear something useful._

"… unconscious, you fool. You OD'd her!" That was probably Vlad.

"It shouldn't have killed her. I didn't give enough for that." That must be the person who had stabbed her with that needle… The voice sounded young, female. The woman spoke English with a heavy accent, just like Vlad, but it was impossible for Sascha to figure out where Vlad's helper could be from.

"You better didn't! She could be, or have been, one of our most lucrative assets. She's young, attractive… If you screwed even this up you _will _be punished, you stupid, incompetent, dumb…" Then a lot of swearing followed. With a great deal of gallows humor, Sascha thought back to one of her Papa's lessons. _Do not show your emotions, Alexandra. It is a sign of weakness if you cannot control them._ Vlad could certainly use a lesson or two from her father.

Wait. Sascha thought again about what that man had said before the swearing. Lucrative asset… What did Vlad mean by 'lucrative asset'? She was not an asset, she was a girl! And she was certainly not planning to earn him any money!

She noticed that the upper half of her body was lying on top of something hard. The edge was pretty sharp and it hurt her belly, so she involuntarily stirred a little, trying to get into a more comfortable position. Vlad stopped swearing immediately.

"Ah, Sascha, you're awake! So Gabbe didn't kill you, after all! Good." She sat up slowly, pressing one hand to her temple, and looked around. She was in a dark room, with bent, metal walls. There were wooden crates perched everywhere, but it was impossible to make out the labels and to be honest her head was hurting too much to care about what they contained anyway. She had been lying face down on top of one of the crates, the edge of which was what had been pressing into her belly. That was going to leave a couple bruises, perhaps even a little cut, but nothing she couldn't handle. She had suffered worse injuries playing with Yuri.

"Where am I?"

"_Where am I?_" the young woman who was probably called Gabbe mocked her. Vlad gave the young woman a look, and she sighed before answering the question.

"On board of a ship, of course. We had to carry you here through the forest. You're pretty damn heavy for such a little girl!" Sascha instantly decided that she didn't like this Gabbe-person. Not as much because of the words themselves as because of the tone Gabbe used. She enjoyed hurting others and didn't even try to hide it.

"If you hadn't sedated me, I could've walked here myself!" she retorted angrily. She was so mad she spoke in Russian. She didn't even notice it until the words had left her mouth. One look at Vlad and she decided that talking in Russian clearly wasn't the smartest thing to do.

"Shut up, both of you." Vlad said, and almost lazily he hit Sascha across the face. She almost started crying, but fought back her tears. _Do not show your emotions…_ "And you," he said, pointing at Sascha, "you have to speak English at all times. Your customers need to be able to talk to you and you have to be able to talk back."

_Customers? What is he – _Sascha's line of thought was interrupted by Gabbe's whiny voice.

"Oh, so I can't mock her, but you can hit her?" Gabbe pouted.

"Of course. Remember who's in charge here, Gabbe. You do as I tell you, or else…" Vlad whispered something to Gabbe and suddenly her face was very pale. Sascha wondered what Vlad had told to her. It had been a threat, no doubt about that, but what exactly?

While Gabbe was distracted, Sascha managed to get a good look at her. Gabbe could have been pretty, but it was hard to see because there was way too much makeup on her face. She was tall, and seemed even taller because she's wearing the highest heels Sascha had ever seen. _How did she manage to walk here through the forest on those things?_ Gabbe's eyes were red-rimmed and she was so skinny it made her look unhealthy. She couldn't have weighed more than 50 pounds soaking wet. All in all, Sascha decided, Gabbe looked like one of the junkies who were always hanging by the school Sascha used to attend, back when she was still Alexandra.

Vlad walked away and left Sascha with her newfound enemy, who caught her staring before she could avert her eyes.

"What're you looking at, newbie?" she snarled aggressively. _Newbie? If I'm the newbie, there must be other girls!_

"Nothing. Are there any other girls here?"

"Yes, there are." Vlad's voice came from somewhere behind her. Startled, Sascha turned around. He was walking through the door together with a girl Sascha's age. The girl's eyes were wide and her posture tense. She looked like she might go into cardiac arrest from pure terror any moment now, and Sascha strongly suspected it had something to do with Vlad's hand resting on her shoulder possessively.

"This is another one of my girls. Just like you. She'll show you around, explain the rules to you." He squeezed her shoulder a little. "_Won't you, _Irina?"

The girl shuddered. "Yes, sir," she said with a terrible Russian accent. Her English was so hard to understand Sascha was surprised Vlad didn't hit Irina. Sascha decided to ignore that he had called Irina 'one of his girls'. If she was, Sascha guessed she was, too. And she didn't like that one bit. If anyone, she belonged to her parents. And they were dead. She turned to the girl.

"Hi, I'm Sascha."

"Irina. Come on." It seemed like Irina had to force the words out, which was probably because of the foreign language. Suddenly, Sascha was thankful for her Papa pushing her to practice her English.

They walked away from Gabbe and Vlad, and as soon as the two were out of sight, Irina seemed a lot happier and even smiled at her, before making her way down a hallway. Sascha understood why; Vlad and Gabbe scared the living daylights out of her too, and Vlad had looked at them as if they were his property. His little piggybanks.

As she walked after Irina, her head was buzzing with questions. _What did Vlad threaten Gabbe with? How many girls are here? Where are Vlad and Gabbe taking us?_

She told herself to stop mulling. She would have to ask Irina some of those questions tomorrow. Sneaking one last look at her father's watch, she decided to keep it hidden from now on. That watch was the last link to her old life. So she put it away carefully – she couldn't have anyone stealing it.

Irina led her to a room filled with cots. Some were pushed together in groups of two or three. In one corner, there were about eight pushed together. They walked to a group of three in the back of the dorm, if it even deserved to be called that. Where Irina stood still and pointed at one of the cots.

"That is yours. These are mine and Aliya's. You'll meet Aliya later today, or maybe tomorrow." Irina was speaking Russian now, so Sascha decided to answer in Russian too.

"Okay. Is she a friend of yours? And aren't we supposed to practice our English or something?"

"Yes, Aliya is a friend. Rule number one: In this place, you don't survive without friends. Speaking of which, all the other girls are having breakfast now, but you look like you could use some sleep… Sweet dreams." Sascha didn't think anyone had ever wished her sweet dreams in such a toneless voice. "We'll go over all the rules later." Irina walked away, probably to eat breakfast.

Only after Irina was gone did Sascha finally allow herself to cry. She let it all out. Her parents' murder, her escape, being sold and drugged… When she felt as though she didn't have any tears left, she fell asleep.

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**Again, I'm sorry for the unintentional delay. If you find any errors or have an idea, etc, please tell me! See y'all next time! I love your faces!**

**Loved it? Hated it? Leave me you thoughts! Reviews are love!**

**Xx Ilse**


	3. This Is Your Life

**'Kay guys, I'll be away until Sunday (Oh my God I'll be going to LONDON! YAY!) and I kind of broke my iPod, so I won't reply to reviews immediately. But I can promise you that I _will_ reply, it might just take me a couple days.**

**Enjoy!**

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"Wake up! Sascha! Dammit! Wake. Up! _Now_."

She groaned. What the hell? Papa never called her for breakfast like that, even if she was late. _What is going…_ Oh. It all came rushing back to her, in one big blur of misery.

The house on fire, her father's death. The sensation of being carried. Apparently she had then blacked out for a while, seeing as the next thing she remembered was a face. Whose was it? Not Ilya. Oh, right, Vlad of course. Then, a girl. What was her name? Irina.

Irina had been the first friendly face she had seen in what felt like years, though no more than mere days could possibly have passed since her last morning as the heir to Zetrov.

"Come _on_, Sascha! It's me, Irina! Wake _up_!" Reluctantly, Sascha opened her eyes to the darkness surrounding her. She heard an exasperated sigh, probably coming from Irina although it was impossible to make out her face. Sascha couldn't see anything but two shapes hovering over her.

"Finally. I thought you were drugged – or dead."

The shape on the right pulled out a lighter and lit it, making sure to shield it from the rest of the room with her hands. She used it to illuminate both their faces.

"Irina, you're always _so_ melodramatic!" That was a new voice. Sascha looked at the girl with the lighter for a moment and saw that the voice belonged to one of the prettiest girls she had ever seen. She took the time to study her for a moment. The girl, who was probably the one Irina talked about earlier, Aliya, looked to be about sixteen. Her hazel eyes, long dark hair and skin the color of coffee with milk suggested she wasn't Russian, more like Asian or something. However, her Russian was flawless and it didn't bear any trace of an accent. While Sascha studied Aliya, Pretty Girl and Irina continued their discussion.

"It could be true, though! Gabbe already has it in for her! She might have OD'd her on purpose or something, right? You know her!"

"True, but so soon? What has Sascha done to her? Gabbe usually doesn't hate girls this much until she knows them for about… um… a couple minutes?"

"Seconds."

The next instant, both girls were shrieking with laughter, though Sascha didn't understand what the joke was. Groggily, she managed to blink and finally sat up.

"What time is it?"

"Ten pm. We're supposed to be asleep, but I wanted to introduce you to Aliya." Irina gestured to Pretty Girl.

"Sascha, Aliya. Aliya, Sascha."

"Hi! How'd you get here? I got here because my parents sold me. They needed the money and Vlad promised I am going to earn lots of money in the USA. Of course, they believed him. Problem is, he probably told the truth…" Sascha's head was spinning. Aliya was talking so fast! And her words weren't making much sense either.

"Your parents _sold_ you? And why don't you want to make money in the USA?"

"Sweetheart, Sascha, haven't you guessed yet what they want us to do? What kind of job we'll get?" Aliya looked at her incredulously, but with pity and sadness mixed in. "They are going to make us hookers, honey. It's what happened to one of my friends. She escaped and sent me a letter, saying what happened and that they were looking for her. She told me she'd send me another letter when she got to safety. I never heard from her again." Tears assembled in Sascha's eyes, threatening to fall. Of course, she had suspected it, but it just became so much more real. A _hooker_? Her? The heir to Zetrov, the billon-dollar empire run by her father – a hooker?

"See, Aliya, now you've done it. You've made her cry." Irina chided, even though she was at least three years younger than Aliya. "Don't worry, Sascha. We have a plan to survive and, eventually, escape." She whispered the last part, glancing around to make sure no one was eavesdropping or even awake. Sascha instinctively did the same, looking around the room, now filled with sleeping girls. Were they all going to be forced to be hookers? The word kept echoing inside her head. _Hooker. Hooker. Hi, I'm Alexandra Udinov, and I'm a hooker._

"Escape?" she asked numbly.

"Yes," Aliya chimed in. "Escape. As soon as we land on US soil. Run. We'll probably land in some forest, to avoid cops and stuff. Steal some food and water, maybe swipe a guard's gun, and run. The plan was that it would just be the two of us, but now we're with three."

"Exactly." Irina looked Sascha square in the eyes. "But until then, you _have_ to follow the rules to avoid punishment."

"Punishment?" It was all going so fast, Sascha didn't even have time to mull over the fact that she was supposed to become a hooker. On the bright side, their fast talking did distract her from the grief that had been threatening to strangle her from the inside ever since she had seen her Papa die. But Irina was talking again, explaining the rules and what would happen if you were to break them, and Sascha knew she had to pay attention.

"Listen, the most important rule is to speak English. At all times, or at least whenever the guards can hear you. If you don't do that…" the brunette shuddered. "Let's just say it's a lot better for your health if you do. Next, you can get out of bed whenever you want, but if you want breakfast I advise you to wake up before 8 am. We have ten minutes for breakfast. The food is gross, but if you don't eat it, it's a long, long day before dinner."

Aliya took over. "Yeah. Very long. You can trust me on that one, I'm speaking out of experience. Once a week, you'll have a one-on-one with Vlad and/or Gabbe. That meeting consists mostly of them threatening you and shoving a needle in your arm with some stuff they want you to be addicted to, probably heroin or something. You won't be able to do anything about that." Damn. How could Sascha ever resist becoming an addict if they made her use those drugs? She didn't really want to think about it, but everything she'd heard so far made it seem virtually impossible. "Once a week won't get you addicted, Sascha, don't look so worried. They just want to make you a little unstable. They manage with most people, but we'll have each other."

"Not yet, Aliya. Don't forget: first the rules, then the pep talk. Okay Sascha. Dinner is at 8 pm. Fifteen minutes for that. Lights out at nine thirty. We don't have a clock, obviously, but I stole a watch I saw lying on the table. Anyway, don't pick fights with the other girls, it's not the 'an eye for an eye'-spirit here. It's more like 'If you give me a black eye, I'll come to your bunk at night and you'll wake up with an organ less'." Sascha chuckled, despite everything that was going on. Surely Irina was exaggerating? But no, she was looking at Sascha, her face deadly serious. Sascha froze.

"I'm serious. It happened before. Now, do you see that girl, Mariya?" Irina pointed to a big, blonde girl, sound asleep on one of the eight cots pushed together. "That's the one who did it. Watch out for her and her crew. Of course, nobody knows it was them, that's an unspoken rule: you never rat out anyone to Vlad. No matter how much you hate them or what they have done, they don't deserve that." Sascha didn't ask why. To be honest, she doubted she even wanted to know.

"Next rule: don't talk to any people you don't know…"

The rules continued for a while, and once that was done, Aliya sketched what life was like on the ship and how all girls related to each other.

"There are about fifteen groups. Most of them consist of two or three girls, and most of those girls know about our future and what Vlad has planned for us, but they don't dare to do anything about it, and they're too scared to associate with each other as well. There's one big group of eight or nine, though. That's Mariya's crew and those are the ones you want to watch out for. They don't know yet what's going to happen to us. They are pretty dim-witted, obviously, otherwise they'd have figured it all out by now. But that is of no importance. If you irritate them, you're dead. They think Vlad is going to get us well-paid jobs in America and they think of us as their competitors. Nobody will tell Mariya and her gang the truth. One girl tried to, a couple months back… Mariya didn't believe her and that bitch ratted little Alexandra out to Vlad. We never saw her again."

Sascha gasped. Not just at what Mariya had done, although that was shocking in itself, but also because the girl whose life was ruined by that bitch Mariya had carried the same name as Sascha used to. She hoped it wasn't some kind of omen. She had enough to deal with as it was, and yet another enemy was _not _what she needed right now.

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**Xx Ilse**


	4. Day One On The Ship

**Well there you have it! The new chapter! Enjoy and please tell me if you find any mistakes, or simply to tell me your thoughts :)**

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Sascha's eyes opened, and immediately she was wide awake. Not because She was such a morning person or something, in fact, she was quite the opposite. But that day was different. Because that day, there were men with machine guns standing over her.

"Get up now," the bulkier one ordered. Sascha looked around and saw that almost all the other girls were lined up already. Behind the guards' backs, she saw her newfound friends staring at her hard. The message Aliya and Irina were trying to get to her was clear: _Get up now or they'll shoot you_. Yeah, figured they might. She jumped off the cot (Sascha was _so_ glad she had slept with all her clothes on) and quickly went to stand next to Aliya.

"Sorry we didn't warn you. Cleaning duty. We were woken up about two hours ago." She whispered, and Sascha remembered something they told her yesterday night. All girls had chores, which were divided differently each day. You had cleaning duty (_"Only Vlad's quarters, of course. Too high and mighty to do it himself, the pig."_), preparing dinner (_"That's two teams. One for the girls, one for Vlad and Gabbe. We get the junk, they get steak. Seriously, we had unidentifiably grey goo, and they had freaking steak!"_), and many more. Most of them sounded awful.

"That's okay. But what–" Sascha was interrupted by a loud _bang_ and a rough 'Should've known to get up when we tell you to, kid.' Her eyes filled up with tears and suddenly dark blobs swam around the room. She had heard those kinds of bangs before...

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"_Come, Alexandra! It's too dangerous! You must hide in your room!" Papa drags me through smoke and fire, but I struggle. There are loud bangs everywhere. I hear a scream, and realization hits me. What did they do to her?!_

"_No! Mama!"_

"_It's too late to save her now. Come!" He manages to drag me into my room and pushes me under my bed. "Hide. Whatever happens, don't come out." Then, someone wearing a gas mask comes storming into the room. My Papa raises his gun in self defence. I hear more loud bangs. Really loud, really close, really scary. I scream as I see Papa crumple to the floor. He turns around and faces me. His face contorted in pain, he extends his arm as if he wants to touch me. His right arm, it's his right arm, the one with the golden watch. I can see it clearly, even now it's covered in blood and soot._

"_Alexandra..." He gasps, with his last breath. I am beginning to struggle to breathe myself, and I'm not sure whether it's smoke inhalation or grief that's constricting my chest. Faintly, I hear a voice. 'Father down'. Now truly beginning to lose my grip on reality, I decide to take something, something to remember him by. The watch! I grab it and quickly hide it inside my sock. I feel someone pulling me out from under the bed and try to struggle, but it's no good. Then, as I get a last good look at my father's dead body, I pass out._

_My parents are gone._

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"Sascha? Sascha!" Sascha saw blurry faces above her. She blinked, with her mind still inside that burning mansion. She wasn't quite sure what had just happened. The faces hovering over her slowly came into better view and gradually grew less blurry. Aliya. Irina. Some other girls. Sascha looked around, trying to make sense of what had happened. She saw a girl, one of the group of three in the left corner of the room, lying on the floor. What happened to her? Did she pass out as well?

Then, Sascha's eyes fell upon a man with a big gun. She shrieked and tried to scramble away from him as fast as possible, but there were hands restraining her. _They've found me. They've found me, and now they're going to shoot me, just like they shot Papa_... But no. Sascha remembered: she was on Vlad's ship and those men were the guards. And that girl didn't pass out, she... she must've been shot. And that probably caused a flashback of sorts.

"Sascha?" Irina sounded genuinely concerned. "What happened?"

"I..." She couldn't talk. Not with these guards standing over her, and all the other girls trying to listen in as well. "I'm fine. Really. I guess I passed out from fatigue." Irina and Aliya shot her concerned, incredulous looks, but they were smart enough not to say anything about it. As soon as the guards had turned away, Sascha mouthed to them '_Later_', to which they both nodded.

One of the guards threw a blanket over the girl that was lying on the floor facedown. Sascha quickly looked away She didn't want to see yet another dead body, thank you very much. She had seen enough of those to last her a lifetime.

The line of girls headed out of the dormitory room for breakfast, and Irina and Aliya hadn't said a word too much the night before. It really _was _brown-greyish goo. Sascha was starving, though. She hadn't eaten anything in at least 36 hours, so she decided to eat it anyway. It left a bitter, burning taste on the back of her tongue, but at least her stomach had finally stopped growling. At least for now.

After breakfast, all girls except for a small group which was on cleanup duty were brought to a huge room, lit with only a few small lamps in the corners. Other than in a three-meter radius from each lamp, the room was pitch black. Aliya and Irina told Sascha that the girls were to stay there. They could do whatever they wanted except fight or try to escape until they were either called for their one-on-one with Vlad, or dinner. The three of them huddled against one of the walls, far away from the lamps, and made sure no one was close enough to overhear them talking.

"So, what happened back there?"

"I... This may sound stupid, but I had a flashback." Sascha could just make out the silhouettes of both girls staring at her. Her eyes weren't used to the darkness yet. After a while, Irina piped up.

"I heard of something like that once. Kid had a childhood trauma, something triggered the memory, and she relived the whole thing. Nobody knew what she saw. A week later, she hanged herself. I think that was in England. Overheard people talking about it." Apparently Irina was quite a clever, curious girls. With great memory nonetheless. Sascha realized she couldn't tell the two of them too much, or else Irina might connect her to the Udinov murder. It had probably been all over the news...

"Yeah that's pretty much what happened to me I think. See, my... my parents were murdered. Only a couple days before Vlad came and took me in. And... I was there, you know. I saw the whole thing go down. My Mama got shot I think, at least I heard a gun and then her scream and after that nothing anymore..." Sascha knew she was rambling, but she didn't care. "And my Papa, he pushed me into my room and under my bed, and... and then someone came in and just... shot him, just like that. I saw it happen, I saw him die! And the noise of the gun! It was so loud... And when that guard shot that girl today, his gun made exactly the... the same noise. And I saw my father die again." Both Irina and Aliya were looking at her with such pitying looks that she almost started to scream. Sascha didn't want pity. Sascha wanted to be strong.

_Be strong, Alexandra._

They sat in the dark for hours, holding each other, clinging on for dear life. After a while, the girls that had been on cleanup duty returned. A few hours later, long after Sascha's legs had gone dead from sitting on her knees for too long, a door opened and a guard walked in. The light behind him was so bright that they only saw his profile, and of course his shiny gun which reflected the light. Sascha averted her eyes, she didn't want to see it. Then, he called out.

"Irina! Come here!" Irina stood up, stumbling slightly. Apparently her legs had gone dead, too. With one last, resigned look back at her friends, she followed the guard out of the room. The door closed and the darkness returned.

"Aliya?" Sascha asked in a small voice. "What's going on? Where are they taking her?"

"No worries, little one. It's nothing too bad... It's time for her one-on-one. I have to warn you though, when she returns she'll be as high as a kite. It'll be our job to comfort her until the drugs wear off. That will probably take two or three hours or so."

"What makes you think that?"

"That's the standard time for someone who hasn't gotten herself into trouble. If you've fought, or tried to escape, or even caused a bit of a scene while getting out of bed, you get more hours. And you don't want that because the more you take, the more you want to take. Now listen carefully. When Irina gets back, there won't be a lot we can do. We'll just have to make her as comfortable as possible and talk to her. We have to make sure that she won't hurt herself when she starts trashing about. That's basically all we can do, to be honest..."

Sascha nodded numbly. She was just following orders now, trying not to think about how messed up her life was. Less than a week ago, at around this time, she must've been playing soccer with Yuri. She didn't have anything in the world to worry about. Now, she was learning what to do to help a drugged girl!

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After a period of time that might have been minutes of hours, Irina staggers back into the room. Aliya jumped up to help her back to 'their' spot on the floor. Once they had made it back, Sascha spotted a tear tracing its way down Aliya's cheek. She definitely loved Irina like a sister, and Sascha realized that she did too. She had only known them for two days, but they were like a little bit of a family already. She wanted to think about that for a little while longer, losing one family and finding another one as a result, but her thoughts were interrupted by Irina.

"Sascha... You are colourful. And why are there blue clouds around your head?" she slurred. Sascha remembered that when she got drugged, she saw colours as well. Startled, Sascha realized that she probably looked exactly the same as Irina, that time she got drugged Gabbe. Irina was sweaty. Her pupils were so dilated that it was impossible to see her irises.

For the next few hours, they helped Irina the best they could. They laid her on the floor, with her head in Aliya's lap, and talked to her whenever she'd start mumbling about colours, places, and people Sascha had never heard of. While they were trying to comfort their friend, Sascha and Aliya got hungry and sleepy. That was the natural instinct to darkness, Sascha presumed – total darkness meant night, night meant sleep. As for the hunger... well, breakfast was a long time ago.

Eventually, another guards came into the room. He called out some names Sascha didn't know, but she could hear everyone sighing with relief.

"That's the cooking crew for us for tonight." Aliya told her. "It means we only have an hour or so more to go. After that, we'll have dinner and then we can go back to the dorm room."

Once the hour had passed, Irina was still in a bit of a daze. Even though she was more awake than before, Aliya and Sascha had to support her anyway when guards walked in and ordered all girls to form a line again. The girl could barely stand. Together they walked, or more like stumbled, into the room where they had had breakfast, squinting and blinking against the now harsh light. They all got another plate of unidentifiable stuff for dinner. It was the same as the goo they had for breakfast, except the portions were a bit bigger and this time it was greenish-grey instead of brown. It tasted just a gross, though. Aliya and Sascha inhaled our own food, trying to get Irina to eat something after that. They had managed to get her to swallow about six spoonfuls of the muck before the guards ushered them all back into the dorm room.

After they had put Irina down on her cot and draped her blanket over her, Sascha crash onto her own cot, even though it was only nine pm. She was exhausted. Not because she had done hard work or something, but because today she had seen a girl get shot and die, relived her father's death, spent hours in the dark waiting for something or the other of which she didn't even know what it was, tried to help a drugged girl and she had barely eaten anything.

If this was going to be her life for now, they'd better get to the USA fast, or she wouldn't even make it there. This ship, its crew and basically the whole journey, it was all way more lethal than a gun could ever be.

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**Loved it? Hated it? Please tell me your thoughts! Reviews are love!**

**Xx Ilse**


	5. First High

**Hello my lovelies!**

**So I have 2 things I want to say.  
One: I'm just going to be a complete brat and not update this fic until I have 15 reviews, which I think is completely possible seeing as I have 12 right now. I'm doing that because I had _zero _reviews for chapter 3 and only 1 I think, for chapter 4 which is kind of demotivating. Aka it makes me sit in the corner crying while asking humanity what I am doing wrong.  
Two: if you read the last version, things will get more interesting next chapter, I promise! I changed the storyline rather drastically so be prepared for that :P**

**I _still _don't own anything. Oh my God such a shocker.**

**Enjoy!**

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The days were starting to blur. Sascha didn't know how long she had been on this goddamn ship exactly, but it must have been nearing a week. Maybe longer. And every day had been the same. It was a dull routine that caused the girls to fall in a kind of dream state most of the time, if only out of sheer boredom. Every day, they were woken up by armed guards, forced some slimy goo down their throats for breakfast and then shuffled to the Dark Room where they were to spend the rest of their day. After a while, one or two girls would get taken away and return minutes or hours later, drugged out of their minds. Their friends would get up and take care of them, and then the quiet and darkness would return. A few hours after that, the door would open again and all girls were allowed out. They tried not to choke on some more brown or green goo, and went to bed in their freezing dorm, under their flimsy blankets, on their brick-hard cots.

There had been fights lately, mostly between Mariya's gang and random other girls. Mariya and her friends would saunter up to one of the girls and tell her she had to hand in her blanket. Every girl had only one ratty blanket and it was icy cold at night, so no one wanted to hand it over, but if they didn't Mariya would have one of her girls beat the other girl up and then took the blanket. Their victims were sporting minor injuries ranging from black eye to a cracked rib, and Sascha knew that if Mariya didn't watch out, Vlad would find out and the tyrannical girl would be killed sooner rather than later. She was sure Vlad didn't like it when his property damaged each other.

Sascha's routine was broken on a day that started out the same as usual. They were woken up and ordered to stand in a line. No one had been stupid enough to stay in bed since the first day, so no girls had been shot. Actually the guards seemed less trigger happy than they used to be, and word was that the guard who had shot that one unfortunate girl had been murdered by Vlad. The pimp's merchandise had been damaged before he had recouped his expenses, and he hadn't been too happy about that, to put it lightly. At any rate, the girls were given breakfast and ushered into the Dark Room. To be honest the day had been pretty okay so far by Sascha's standards. No dead bodies, no flashbacks, no fights. Her attitude changed drastically, though, when a guard came in. As usual, he called out a name, but this time it wasn't just one of the other random girls' names.

"Sascha. Please come with me," he said.

Sascha continued to sit against the wall, waiting for someone to respond and go with the guard. Then she noticed Aliya's elbow nudging her side gently.

"Go with him, get up Sascha, come on!" Irina hissed. "If you don't go there yourself he'll come and get you!"

Sascha exchanged a panicked look with her friends. Vlad scared her terribly, not to mention the drugs he would pump into her system. The last thing she wanted was a one-on-one with him, and what if Gabbe were there? That would only make things worse. But she knew she had to go. If she didn't, she would probably take a bullet to a non-lethal area. And Sascha did not like bullets. She got up slowly and walked over to the guard with numb feet. She couldn't feel her hands out of fear and only realized she was shaking and tears were making their way down the grime on her face when the guard told her to 'stop the wailing, brat'. Almost as in a trance, she followed him. He led her to the cargo room, where he shut the door behind her and left her by herself. She looked around and realized she was in the room with all the crates, in which she came to when she had first arrived on the ship.

Behind her, a door slammed open, bouncing back from the wall. A reverberating _clang _rang out, and Sascha flinched. _There are only two fears that cannot be unlearned by humankind. The fear of loud noises, and vertigo. You do not suffer from vertigo, Alexandra, and therefore in a few years' time the only fear I want you to have is the fear of loud noises. _One of her father's lessons flashed through her mind, and Sascha knew that he had been wrong. There were two more. The fear of dying and the fear of losing control, by getting tied up for example, or drugged. She swiveled around and looked at the syringe and needle Vlad had clasped in his right hand.

The fear of losing control.

"Ah, Sascha! So it's your turn now," grinned Vlad, showing Sascha his disgustingly yellowed teeth. "Gabbe, what's she done wrong?"

"Let's see. Well, she hasn't caused us any trouble, but she broke the rules once when she didn't get out of bed in time. I'd say she is either being covered for by one of the guards, she has very strict friends, or she is just an obedient little brat." Gabbe looked up and met Sascha's eyes, then proceeded to glare at her. It is as if she wanted to strangle Sascha for not giving her a chance to punish the girl.

"Great. Definitely not one of Mariya's group then, are you?" Vlad laughed heartily. "Now they cause me trouble all the time! Oh well. I'll deal with those later. Now, what shall I do with you..." He was silent for a moment, no doubt pondering how long he would keep Sascha drugged. "Gabbe, give her a three-hour shot, will you? She's deserved a reward."

Irina and Aliya had explained this to Sascha. The more a girl broke the rules, the longer she would be drugged. That had sounded strange to Sascha at first. After all, if a sex slave was drugged, wouldn't that offer her an escape from her horrible reality? But that's not the way things worked. The drugs didn't just offer an escape. They would claw at the girl's memory, her sanity and her ability to resist the addiction. And once she was hooked, the rules were the other way around. If the girl would then break a rule, she wouldn't be drugged for days on end, causing her body to go into withdrawal. Only when Vlad thought the girl was punished enough would he grant her the mercy of another shot. And of course, if someone broke the rules too much or tried to escape, they would be killed.

While Sascha was thinking about this simple yet effective system, Gabbe had grabbed a vial from one of the closest crates and handed it to Vlad. He attached a needle and shoved it into Sascha's forearm, right into a vein. She winced. _Needles._ He pressed down on the plunger.

She was expecting colours and then darkness to come and take her, like last time she had been drugged by Vlad. This time around though, the drugs took a while to start working. Sascha was aware enough of her surroundings to realize that one of the guards had grabbed hold of her elbow and was half dragging, half carrying her back to the dark room. As soon as they arrived, he shoved her through the door and she stumbled a few steps, trying to regain her balance. Irina rushed forward to catch her, and with a glare at the guard's retreating back, she moved Sascha's limp body back to where Aliya was sitting.

"Sascha. How long did he give you?" Aliya asked her. The older girl's voice sounded faint and urgent at the same time, which was a really weird combination. _How loo-ooo-ong_, it echoed in Sascha's mind. She knew it was important, so she strained to answer through the fog in her brain.

"Three hours," she slurred. She was surprised at how sleepy she sounded, and giggled a bit at how it differed from her usual voice. The words had come out as _dhwie aauws,_ but Aliya seemed to have understood anyway.

"Thank God she only got three hours. I got five, I think. Or six," Irina said, but her words echoed around the room, which suddenly didn't seem so dark anymore. It was the most wonderful, colourful thing Sascha had ever seen. Brown and green and yellow and red and blue... They swirled around in clouds, forming patterns and blobs. Some of them mixed to create new colours or hunched together to form Alexandra's Papa, Mama, or her old house. She saw her Mp3-player and Yuri. As her childhood friend was floating away, she tried to grab his hand, but missed. He looked so fuzzy. Everything looked fuzzy. Like shapes in the clouds. The swirling colours formed words. They were writing whole stories bouncing around in the air, but Alexandra couldn't read them, they dissolved too quickly. She looked up and tried to focus her gaze. Her mother's face was hovering over her.

"Mama?" Her voice sounded distant and slurred. She realized that it was out there in the real world. Alexandra ignored the building dizziness and tried to focus on the echoing, purple voice that was now drifting around her head.

"_No... Aliya."_

Another rope of sound formed, this one more silvery. It was a little lower than the first and Alexandra couldn't make out what it was saying because she lost focus again, and now she was weightless. She floated through her old house, her parents' room, Papa's study... _Why are the rooms here? My house was... something happened to it. What was it? _Alexandra noticed the hallway that led to her own room. She drifted through the fuzzy, out-of-focus door which was coloured a strange mix of purple and green, and lost focus again. The next thing she saw was her father on the floor. Asleep? Maybe. But he looked distant, wrapped in a symphony of silvers and reds and greens and blues.

She floated towards her Papa, even went as far as touching his face, which was when his eyes shot open. _Alexandra! Be strong! Wake up! _She tried to scream but couldn't. The colourful clouds of sounds, forming soothing words just moments before, wrapped themselves around her. They pushed against her body as if asking for attention. They were pulling her down, through the floor of her room, through the bottom of the house, to the core of the Earth, and it was so hot. So hot and orange and red and loud.

And finally, the awaited darkness came and saved her.

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**Please leave me your thoughts! You know you want to push that 'REVIEW' button...**

**Xx Ilse**


	6. Double Vision

**Hey hey guys ^^**

**So! The newest installment of _Sascha_!**

**For those of you who have read the last version, the first change in storyline (trust me there will be some MAJOR changes) happens in this chapter. You name this change, I'll dedicate the next chapter to you. Oh, as for dedications, this chapter goes to HeresAna for letting me use her name and asking me if I'd update soon. Thank you and I hope this is soon enough! ;)**

**I don't own the characters except some of them I guess :P**

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Morning. Ugh.

Sascha woke up with a head that felt as if someone was trying to destroy it from the inside out. The colours all seemed too bright, even in the dimly lit room, and she had to squint in order to be able to see what's going on without groaning. Nevertheless, she knew she had to get up, and Irina held her steady once Sascha was in line with the others.

"The first time is always the hardest," she whispered, seemingly not caring about the trigger-happy guards around them. "You'll feel better when we're in the Dark Room, I promise." One of the guards glared at her for talking, but then his eyes fell upon Sascha's pale face with the dark semi-circles beneath her eyes. He laughed and said something to the guard next to him while pointing at the former heiress. The other guard smirked too and mumbled something back. Sascha couldn't make out what they were saying, but apparently Aliya, who was standing on her other side, could. She looked at the two with a murderous face, and if looks could kill those two would be smothering heaps of ash by now. Even though she never said a word, her message was clear. _Fuck off, morons. Leave her alone. _Sascha was grateful that the pretty girl was standing up for her, but she didn't want Aliya to get into trouble because of her.

"What did they say?" Sascha asked the older girl, once they had started to walk toward breakfast. She looked around before asking to make sure none of the guards would hear her.

"Nothing you want to know, Sascha. I mean it. Please don't –"

"_Suka! _That's mine! Give it back!" Sascha guessed correctly that the angry voice had been Mariya's. Again. Fight number 24601 was about to start. The tall girl was standing threateningly close to two blondes who were standing with their backs to Sascha. Backing away slowly, the short blonde girls turned around a bit and Sascha finally caught a glimpse of their faces. Or, well, their face. Sascha gasped. By now, she knew most girls by face, but these two must've been new. She didn't remember ever seeing them before, and they didn't have a face she'd forget easily. Was this her hangover's doing? Was double vision one of the symptoms of coming off a high? The two girls were the same! Exactly the same build, height, shoulder-length haircut... The same angry eyes and the same mouths, contorted into the same irritated snarls. The exact same upturned eyebrows and cute faces. The same pointy chins. Who _were _these girls?

"Aliya, Irina, who are those girls?" Sascha asked curiously. Of course, curiosity killed the cat (and a girl or two in this place), but she couldn't help asking

"Don't ask questions, Sascha. It's dangerous," Aliya chided. Irina didn't say anything, but the way she looked at Aliya showed she was fascinated by the mystery behind the twins, too. With a sigh, Aliya gave in. "I don't know their names or background stories, but they are obviously twins. That probably means they were sold by parents who couldn't take care of them. Anyway, they came in yesterday while you were high," Aliya told Sascha, answering her question.

"But if they decided to pick a fight with Mariya, they probably don't have people that look out for them in the way you two did when I was brought in," Sascha mused. It was either that, or the twins had a death wish. Or they were just plain dumb. Possibly a combination of the three. She gave her friends a grateful smile. If they hadn't been here for her when she came in, she might have found herself in the same position the newbies were in now.

"What have they done to aggravate Mariya like that anyway? What's going on?" Irina was too short. She couldn't look over people's heads like Aliya. Neither could Sascha, but she was standing right at the corner of the, so if she bent her upper body just a bit she could look around the girls in front of her without the guards noticing.

"Sounds like they stole something of hers," Sascha whispered to Irina as a guard stepped closer to them. He pushed Sascha back into the corner, which she had unknowingly stepped away from, and slapped her across the face for good measure.

"Shut up," he hissed. Then, he eyed her up and down, and after his eyes had lingered on Sascha long enough to make her uncomfortable, he stepped away. Once he was out of earshot, Aliya gave her two protégées a detailed description of everything that was going on.

"Yes, I think they have indeed stolen something. I think it's... It looks like a hairbrush. When is the last time we even combed our hair anyway? How the hell did Mariya get her paws on one? Whatever, she probably bribed one of the guards into giving it to her. Oh look, now they've started to fight. Stupid kids, picking a fight with Mariya... She's almost a foot taller than them! Of course, the twins are with two, but – oh no, the guards, here they come..." Shouting filled the dorm, and Aliya reported that one or two of the guards had taken out their guns already.

"Maybe they're trying to compensate for... _something_," Irina mumbled to Sascha, and they giggled.

"Knock it off or I'll shoot you!" one of the guards shouted. It was effective, Aliya told them.

"Oh my God... One of the twins threw the damn thing on the ground. Okay, that's it. That one has a death wish. Now she's... she's stomping on it? ARE YOU INSANE!?" Aliya yelled at the girl. "KNOCK IT OFF! MARIYA WILL _KILL _YOU!" She was probably right. Sascha could hear Mariya screaming the exact same words in the background while the guards were holding her back. The former heiress pressed a shaking hand against her temple. Her head was pounding from all this screaming and her eyesight was still not back to normal, everything seemed to be outlined in bright white. Despite all that, she somehow managed to stay conscious. The young Russian blinked rapidly and took a few deep breaths, before looking Irina in the eyes. Sascha could tell they were thinking the same thing. Aliya was way too kind. She cared too much if someone was about to get hurt or in trouble and that would probably get her killed someday. Like today, for instance. There were already some guards looking in their direction, distracted from the fight between Mariya and the other girl by Aliya's shouting. Irina clamped her hand over Aliya's mouth and even though the girl was two or three years older than Irina, she calmed down. A little.

"Come on, Aliya. Let's go." Sascha told her quietly.

"But those girls–"

"They should have known better." Irina said with a certain tension in her voice. "It's harsh, I know. I don't want to do this any more than you do. But they should've known what they were getting themselves into. We can't help them anyway."

"Alright," Aliya conceded. "Fine. But tonight, we are going to explain all the rules to them, and protect them from Mariya. That girl will murder them, if the guards don't do it first. And just look at the twins. I mean, they're even smaller than the two of you! There's no way they'd survive this coming night if we don't look out for them."

"Deal. Now, let's go." They moved to the breakfast room and finally got something to eat. Once they were done, they were as usual marched to the Dark Room, which was a godsend for Sascha's still pounding head. No sign of the girls, or Mariya.

"I hope they haven't killed them," Sascha said. "Not the twins, at least. They can kill Mariya for all I care." She suddenly realized she meant it. Her attitude had changed so much in the last couple of weeks! Less than three months ago, she had made her first business decision. She had given her father's company its new name, Zetrov. And only moments before that, she'd gotten angry with her father for scaring people, hurting them, and even killing them. And now... now she was wishing for the death of a girl she barely even knew! She had been so naive, that afternoon when she read the rumours about her Papa on the Internet... Back then she might not have known it yet, but this world is a cruel one and that's a fact. If you want to survive, others will have to die. That's a fact, too.

"Hey, Sascha?" Irina nudged her gently with her elbow. "What were you thinking about? You zoned out for a second."

"Nothing really. I was thinking about Ze– I mean, my past." Sascha bit her tongue in shock. _If you tell anyone you're a Udinov, it will be a death sentence for you. And for anyone who ever knew you. _Ilya's voice was ringing in her ears. He had sold her to Vlad, yes, but he didn't deserve to die and neither did his children. Why was it this hard to keep her identity a secret? She had nearly told Irina about Zetrov! Sascha managed to choke down her emotions and quickly composed her face. Something her father had taught her. _Do not show your enemies your fear, Alexandra. They will use it against you._ And although Irina was no enemy, Sascha knew she could never tell her the truth. It would endanger the little black-haired girl, might even kill her, and Sascha didn't want that. She looked around anxiously, hoping no one else had heard her little slip-up, when she noticed Irina eyeing her curiously.

"'Ze–?' What were you going to say?"

"Nothing!" Sascha snapped. Irina recoiled, and Sascha realized she'd been too harsh. "Just – don't ask, okay, Irina? Please? It's... hard to explain. I'm sorry." The girl nodded. And Sascha allowed herself to relax a little. Luckily, this particular little crisis had blown over without revealing too much. Aliya leaned towards them.

"It's okay, you know. Keeping your past a secret. It's the future we have to focus on. Like, how to not become a heroin-addict. Or a hooker. Or both." Both Irina and Sascha nodded, realizing shewas right. But then Aliya shot Sascha a _look_, and the younger girl froze. She had seen that _look_ before, on Mama's face. About a year back, Alexandra had stolen some cookies from the jar her parents always kept in the top drawer, and her Mama had found out. She knew her daughter's secret, but decided against telling Alexandra's Papa. Katya knew Nikolai would overreact, and she didn't want her girl to get in unnecessary trouble, so instead of scolding her in front of her father, Katya had only given Alexandra one of those _looks _all parents seemed to have. It had told the little girl 'we'll talk about this later'. And Aliya looked the same right now.

_She knows. _Sascha's head told her that she was paranoid, that she was overreacting, but her instinct was insisting the opposite. _She knows who I am. She knows I'm Alexandra._

Aliya cast her eyes down, and Sascha just sat there dumbfounded. Irina, who had noticed nothing of the silent exchange and Sascha's inner turmoil, was chattering away rather happily for their situation. She was telling Sascha about something she and Aliya had forgotten to mention earlier: Sascha would be on cleanup duty that afternoon.

'After dinner, you and three other girls have to stay. I think their names are Ana, Tanya and Oli, or something like that. All I know is that neither of them belongs to either Mariya's gang or our friendlies.'

There were some of the smaller gangs they were on friendly terms with. That didn't mean they were friends exactly, but they were no enemies either. The friendlies wouldn't steal Sascha, Irina or Aliya's blankets no matter how cold the room was, but if one of their blankets was stolen by someone else they wouldn't help each other to get it back either. It meant they wouldn't harm each other while they were sleeping, but they also wouldn't stand up for each other if someone like Mariya tried to. Basically, your friendlies were the ones that would ignore you and pay the least attention to you. Your friends saved your live on a regular basis and kept you as sane as possible. The rest you had to watch out for because they were wildcards. Of course Mariya's gang was the worst. The term 'friendlies' had been thought up by some skinny redhead girl called Alissa; the girls had nothing to do all day except talk and think up nicknames. The term had just sort of stuck around. Alissa was dead now, she was the girl that had been shot on Sascha's first day on the ship.

'Anyway, all of you will get the girls' plates, dump them in the sink and clean them up. One of the guards will hand out two towels and two of you will dry the plates. The two that don't need to dry have to go to Vlad's quarters. That's the job you want. You can clear out his plates and clean them up too. Maybe steal some scraps of steak, the pig never finishes it all. Oh, and don't drop anything or you'll be severely punished by a nice few extra hours of high. ' Sascha cringed. Her head was still a bit sore from her hangover, although it was starting to fade. She closed her eyes and rested her head against the curved, metal wall of the ship, waiting for the guards to come and call them to dinner.

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**So I hope you liked it! And since the 'I won't update until I have X reviews'-thing worked well last time, I'm going to be a brat again and ask for 20 this time. I have 17 now (OMG THANK YOU GUYS I'M SO GRATEFUL AND DOING A HAPPY DANCE EVERY TIME I GET ONE!) so that's another three needed to get the next chapter :D**

**Oh, and if you guys hate me doing this, just say so and I'll stop I guess. It's up to you!**

**Xx Ilse**

**PS. The next chapter will be so exciting! You have a gruesome [spoiler] to look forward to! ^^**


	7. Cross My Heart And Hope To Die

**Hi **

**Bongiorno guys :)**

**So I know I've been away for way too long and stuff but I went to Italy for a weeklong holiday! YAY! ^^ So I felt guilty and wrote this today in between my chores and unpacking bags and all that jazz, and I hope you like it.**

**And can I just say oh-my-god those two latest episodes. I watched them in one go when I got back and just oh-my-god. Oh-my-God. And OMG OMG OMG YES WE GOT A (partial :/) SEASON FOUR! WOOHOO! :DDDDD (and yes, I know I'm late to that party. Don't remind me, haha)**

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The door slammed open.

"Get out, all of you." The familiar shadow of a guard with a gleaming gun appeared in the doorway. "_Today, _suka!" He slammed the nearest girl in the stomach with his gun. "Get up and get out. All of you get out, playtime's over. Get up, get in line, and walk out the door. Go on, it's not that hard. The boss has a surprise for you."

The girls looked at each other, confused. What was going on? Usually a guard simply opened the door and told them to get up, they'd walk through the narrow metal hallway to the room where they'd get dinner and then they'd be marched back to the large space with the cots for the night.

"Either he's new," Irina whispered to Sascha, "or his girlfriend dumped him. Or he has a stick up his ass." Sascha grinned silently. Trust Irina to think up an insult for whoever she disliked. Not wanting to fall behind and get the guard's attention, she grabbed Irina's hand. Together with Aliya the two of them made their way over to the door, where a line was beginning to form. Sascha craned her neck, looking for the twins. Finally finding them, she saw that they were standing only three or four girls behind her. A second guard walked up to them.

"Ana, Tanya." Sascha hit her friends to alert them, a little too hard judging by their faces.

"The twins are Ana and Tanya! I'll talk to them on duty, okay?" They nodded, then told her to shut up and listen to the conversation the guard was having with the twins.

"…cleanup duty today." The two tiny blondes looked at him without saying anything. The left one, Sascha noticed she was maybe two centimeters shorter than her sister, looked up at the guards, drawing a breath to reply.

"I'm sorry," she spoke in English with a Russian accent, as all girls did. Sascha blinked, surprised. The twin's English was almost as good as her own, definitely above average. Of course, even with the more fluent ones teaching their less fluent friends the most important words, many girls didn't even speak English at all so the average was rather low. The girl continued. "But we do not know what that is and what we have to do..."

"And we want to go, um," The other twin, who had a stronger accent, seemed to be searching for words. She looked to her sister for help, but only found raised shoulders and wide eyes. Apparently she didn't know either. At that, the second girl just continued in Russian, with a quiet "We just want to go домой." The guard hit her in the face with the butt of his gun for her efforts.

"You don't speak Russian here," he barked at the crying girl. "Speak English or don't speak at all. And you can't go home." While his lip curled in a disgusted sneer, he continued. "Ask one of the other girls to tell you what to do. The others on cleanup duty are Oli," he pointed to a tall, chubby girl with a square chin who was standing right behind the first guard, "and Sascha." At this, he pointed to where Sascha, Irina and Aliya were quietly listening in to the conversation.

"Shit, he knows your name," Aliya said in shock. "Not a good sign. If they know your name you're either troublesome like Mariya, which you are not, or they have taken up a… special liking to you." Choosing to worry about that later on, Sascha smiled as best as she could and waved at the twins. She beckoned her friends to walk forward with her, ignoring the guard at the door who was yelling something irrelevant about staying in line as well as Irina whispering something about her having a death wish.

"Hi, I'm Sascha. And these two idiots," she pointed at her friends, who were making weird faces at the retreating back of the guard, "Knock it off you two. You want to get killed? Sorry. These two are Aliya and Irina. You can trust them."

The twin nodded. "I'm Ana, and my sister is Tanya."

"Yeah, so we've heard from that moron." With a nod to where the guards were standing Irina made clear who she meant. "Speaking of… Seems the idiot with the stick up his ass wants us to follow the other girls."

"Irina, stop insulting them," Aliya said. "I know you hate them, but you'll just endanger us all! If anyone hears you they'll kill you. Remember our plan?"

Irina sighed. "Yeah, I remember. Survive, then escape," she mumbled reluctantly.

The twins had been following all this open mouthed. "Survive?" one of them whispered. The other one, Sascha couldn't tell them apart, finished her sister's sentence. "…Escape?"

"Shh!" Aliya, responsible and concerned as ever, effectively shut them up. "Later! We'll explain life on the ship to you guys tonight, okay? First, dinner and cleanup duty."

One of the twins looked up at Aliya shyly, asking her a question, and Sascha noticed for the first time how young they seemed. They couldn't have been older than eleven! Suddenly, the words the girl had said came through to her. "Will dinner be better than breakfast?"

The other one chimed in, her nose crinkled up at the memory of the slimy stuff. "Yeah, that was gross!"

Aliya laughed softly, a smile that seemed genuine and amused at first sight but when looked upon closer revealed itself as sadness. "Sorry girls, but it won't be better. If anything, it'll be worse."

At that wonderfully cheerful remark, they entered the room where they'd have dinner. Sascha looked around, paying close attention to her surroundings for the first time in weeks. She was suddenly seeing everything as if she saw it for the first time, the way the twins must be seeing it right now. The rounded walls, which surrounded them everywhere they looked, were all the same metallic grey tint and provided the ship's interior with a kind of prison-look. The way you'd always see your own garbled reflection in the curved metal had given Sascha a few minor claustrophobic attacks when she had first gotten there; they gave you the feeling that the walls were closing in on you, that there was no way out, all the while showing your own wide-eyed reflection. Eventually, Sascha had gotten over that, at least enough to not freak out every time they walked through a hallway. Which was lucky, because the only places she had so far seen were narrow hallways and a few relatively large rooms, like the Dark Room, the dorm and the eating room. In the eating room, the tables were screwed to the floor. Sascha figured it was to prevent them from sliding around.

She gathered her thoughts for a bit. There were some things that were always there, and she decided to focus on those. Take the neat total darkness, for instance. During the whole time she had been there, Sascha hadn't seen daylight even once. There were no windows, at least not in this part of the ship. She never doubted once that Vlad had some. The few lamps that were there to illuminate the places Sascha had seen so far seemed to be better at casting shadows than enlightening the place in more than a three feet radius. Add to that the fact that there were simply too few of them, and you had a whole lot of girls living in constant twilight.

Another one of the few constants in the girls' lives right now was the cold. It was there all the time, even when they were huddled together with their friends against a wall in the Dark Room. It was worst at night. The girl shielded themselves from it with their blankets as best as they could, but just one of the ratty, threadbare things would simply not be enough. Therefore at any moment during the night, you could wake up and notice someone sneaking through the dorm, carrying a blanket she had just stolen from one of the others. To make sure they wouldn't steal from you, you had to develop a kind of sixth sense, to notice when someone was near even when sleeping.

And of course another thing that kept many girls out of their sleep, was the ever-present rolling and lurching of a ship out at sea. Sascha had seen many girls get a sickly green face and run to the slightly closed-off corner of the room where the hole in the floor was that they had to use as a toilet as well as vomiting hole. Sascha shuddered. The mere thought of that stinking hole in the floor was nearly enough to make her throw up herself, so she quickly discarded it.

Shivering, she looked at her half eaten dinner. Left and right she heard some whispers. They all were on the same topic, she gathered: speculating why they had been called out this way. All of them were asking about what Vlad was planning, and how they might be able to shield themselves from it. Some were worrying about whether they'd be able to shield their friends. Some others were crafting plans to make sure the girls they disliked got the worst of it.

Sascha sneaked a glance at the twins, who were sitting on either side of her. Their eyes were cast down, their shoulders slumped. The one on her left, she thought it was Ana, was crying silently. Sascha bent towards her slightly and put an arm around the girl's slim shoulders.

"Don't worry, it'll be alright. You and your sister are with us now." Sascha suddenly realized something, and with hope coloring her voice she bent over to where Irina was sitting. "This makes us one of the largest groups! We're with five now, just one less than those girls at the other end of the dorm. That's the biggest group there is, save Mariya's!"

Irina turned to look at her. With a shrug and an indifferent look on her face Sascha wasn't used to, she pursed her lips before formulating a reply. "Yeah, save Mariya's. Don't forget, they're with eight. Most girls won't come after us now, which is good, but Mariya has a bone to pick with the twins. We better watch our backs before she breaks them."

"Wow, thanks a lot, Ms. Positive. We're with five," Sascha said, turning back to Ana, "which means most girls won't come after us. We'll keep you save."

The little blonde looked up at her. Relief and hope as well as doubt were easy to read from her face. "Really? I'm scared, Sascha."

Sascha smiled as reassuringly as she could. "Really. We'll protect you. Tonight, we will explain what life is like on the ship to the both of you. We will explain the rules." Sascha's gaze slowly moved to Mariya. She waited until Ana had followed it, and then continued, putting some emphasis on her words, "We'll also tell you who not to make angry. We've got your back now. That holds true for you too, Tan," she added, turning to Tanya and winking at her.

Ana shivered. "What we did this morning, stealing that big girl's hairbrush… That wasn't a smart move was it?"

"No," Sascha answered, both her voice and her eyes suddenly deadly serious. "That was not a smart thing to do."

"We just wanted to show that we won't do as they say!" Tanya whispered loudly. "They don't control us!" Obviously she was a lot more defiant than her sister. She had probably been the instigator of the whole thing. Sascha knew she had to stop this here and now, or else the twins would get in terrible trouble sooner rather than later.

"Listen to me, Tanya," she said in an urgent voice. "Both of you, listen. You _have _to do as they say. You _can't _get in trouble! You have to lay low, stay out of trouble. They do control you, at least for now. Do you understand?" She met Tanya's defiant gaze. "Do you?" Sascha leaned towards the shorter blonde, who sighed before admitting defeat.

"Yeah, I do."

"Good. Now be silent, okay?"

Sascha rested her chin on her elbows, her eyes following the contours of the ship's curved, metal walls once more. They came to rest on the twins' reflections, quietly eating the brownish goo they had for dinner.

She was more shaken by the arrival of those two little blondes than she had let on to be. They seemed so young, way too young for all of this. Sascha suddenly felt that she had to protect the two of them, if it was the last thing she did. _I promise, _she thought. _I won't let anything happen to you. Cross my heart and hope to die._

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**Actually I was planning to do the cleanup duty, a horrific [spoiler] in Vlad's [spoiler] and a gruesome [spoiler] (hehehe) this chapter, but I'm bone tired and it's 1 am here so you'll just have to bear with me. I figured I'd send this out here already, and the next chapter WILL contain the things mentioned above. And it shall be perversely awesome in a sadistic, perverse way ^^ (my favorite haha I'm such a psycho)**

**Oh and this chapter is for chill-the-beans, as promised. Lucky guess in that review right there XD**

**And one last thing: I really want to thank Violet Temperance for her advice and also giving me even more advice over PM. I hope this is better? :3 I mean I know I crammed it all in one piece but I'll even it out more in the next bit. This was just to make sure everyone could see it better at once, like you said ^^**

**SOOOO all of you, please tell me your thoughts! I love hearing them :DDD**

**Until the next update! (Which will probably be way too long from now anyway, sorry in advance about that)**

**Xx**


	8. Chores From Hell

**WOOT WOOT! ALL OF CHAPTER 8 IS HERE!**

**This chapter still goes out to Codekiki12 and Ayushi92. They both sent me a PM telling me I should get my shit together already and update soon, and then I wrote and published the first half of this chapter. Then, while I was away on a hiking/climbing holiday in the Alps, they both sent me a PM again. Basically, when I got back, I read them and that caused me to write and edit and improve the fic all night long. And so, thanks to them: here's the entire chapter 8! Thanks girls :) Love ya~**

**Enjoy!**

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"Ana, Oli, Sascha, Tanya," the guard called out. The girls, rising as their names were called, glanced at each other quickly. Sascha noticed Oli making a face at her friend, a strikingly beautiful redhead. The redhead gave Sascha, Tanya and Ana a quick once-over, then whispered something in Oli's hair. Oli frowned, then nodded however reluctantly. Sascha didn't blame the tall, slightly chubby girl at all for being reluctant. If she had been the one who had to work with three people who clearly were each other's friends, but not yours, she herself would have been just as reluctant to. Then again, Sascha reflected grimly, although Oli may not have realized it, she was in fact quite lucky. If Sascha, Ana and Tanya had not been the ones to be scheduled with her but three more ill-tempered, cruel girls instead, she would have been in far more trouble than she was right now.

The four girls slowly, carefully, walked their way along the metal tables, occasionally bumping into others. Once or twice, they would have fallen if not for their hands sliding along the backs of the chairs for support. The ship seemed to be lurching more than it usually did today, Sascha noted, and she wondered why that could be. Once the four of them were gathered at the end of the room, where the rusty sink was, they got to hear what exactly it was they had to do. Meanwhile, the other girls filed out of the room and into the dormitory. In the distance, Sascha heard some surprised gasps and a few yells. Worried about what the hell might be going on, she focused on the guard, who was explaining what the girls were supposed to do.

"One of you has to go pick up the dishes from Vlad's quarters. Another one of you will wash the dirty plates of both the girls and the boss. Make sure the boss's plates and glasses are squeaky clean and whatever you do, don't break anything or you will suffer the consequences. The other two have to dry the plates."

"Dry the plates with what!?" Tanya asked loudly, a rebellious glint in her eyes. "I don't see any towels around, and I'm not planning on drying it with my hair or whatever, no thank you sir!" She obviously didn't like being bossed around. Both Ana and Sascha shot her a sharp look, while Oli simply froze. The three of them unconsciously pulled their heads down and their shoulders up, their faces slightly scrunched up as if waiting for a punishing blow; the guards did not take kindly to girls being rude. Instead of hitting Tanya, threatening either her alone or all four girls with a gun or shouting, as they had expected, the guard just wrote something on a notepad. Sascha hadn't given it much thought until then, but it she had seen little black notepads like that one on all the guards. It seemed all of them had suddenly been equipped with one, though she was sure the notebooks hadn't been there before.

When the guard turned away to show where the towels were, the little black notepad still open in his hand, she decided to take a quick peek at it over his shoulder. What she saw made her brows furrow in surprise. It was a table, she realized, the columns labelled after crimes. During the few seconds she had, Sascha managed to make out 'Fighting', 'Speaking Russian' and 'Being Rude'. The rows were labelled with names. Sascha recognized only a few, but that was enough. In the checkbox where the row labelled 'Tanya' crossed the column labelled 'Rude', there was an X.

_They're recording all our crimes!, _she realized. Following that line of thought, she figured that all guards probably had the same table, and at the end of the day would compare them. But why start now? It didn't make any sense. It was a smart system, it made sure every little error would be seen, noted, and punished accordingly. Perhaps Vlad hadn't thought of it until that very morning or perhaps the days before? No, that couldn't be it. Vladimir Ivanov was way too clever to have missed something like that. It didn't make sense. Why was everything changing now? Being called out of the Dark Room with the promise of a 'surprise', the changes in policy, the heavier lurching and rolling of the ship... Sascha could only make one thing of it.

They had regularly stopped to pick up Vlad's newest 'assets', but Sascha was guessing they wouldn't be anymore. Tanya and Ana had been the last of the girls to be picked up. They were out at sea and Vlad was taking his preparations up a notch. That was the 'surprise'. Had to be.

Sascha felt ridiculously happy having figured something out. It might not have been much of an important discovery, figuring out that they were at sea and that a big change was coming, however it did give her and her friends some sort of security. At least now they had a snippet of information none of the others had, and after all the saying 'knowledge is power' still held true. Even on an old, large ship filled with abandoned girls.

"You," Oli said, "Go get Vlad's dishes. I'll stay here with the twins and get started on our plates."

Ana glanced at Sascha fearfully.

"Don't worry, I'm not going to eat you," Oli told her impatiently. "Grab a towel or something and get this done so we can get back to the others." Sascha, in a good mood from figuring something out, added 'she truly won't eat you guys, she looks like a vegetarian to me' to that statement, winked at the twins to lift their spirits, and dashed into the corridor leading to Vlad's quarters. Aliya had pointed it out to her earlier.

Sascha neared a door, positioned at the end of the hallway. There were two armed guards present, one with pockmarks all over his face and one with an ugly scar on his left check. They looked at her with anything but smiles on their faces. Sascha didn't have a clue why they were there; who would possibly both want to hurt Vlad out on the sea and more importantly, have the means to do so? It was probably merely a display of his power, she decided. Either that or he was afraid of his girls, which somehow didn't seem very likely to her.

"What are you doing here?" Pock Mark asked. Scar Face had apparently decided to let his buddy do the talking, as he just stood watching with a grim expression.

"I'm here to pick up the dishes," she answered as politely as she could, not daring to provoke them. If she was right about this new system, she didn't want her name to appear in those books more than absolutely necessary.

"Go in," Park Mark said, and Sascha slipped past him, leaving the door open so she wouldn't need to reopen it when she returned with an armful of plates.

Looking around Vlad's quarters, the first thing she noticed was that there were some girls around, all skinny and scantily clad. She second and third things she noticed were that Vlad wasn't there and that Gabbe was, unfortunately positioned right between Sascha and the dinner table. The tall junkie, noticing Sascha like a vulture noticing its prey, walked right up to her before Sascha could even think about avoiding her.

What are _you_ doing here, punk?" Gabbe hissed. "These are _Vlad's_ quarters, which means, which means that _you _are not allowed to be here. You bet I'm gonna report this! Sneaking around like a little thief, are ya? One might think you were up to something..."

Sascha froze. If Gabbe was going to accuse her, she knew she would be in big trouble. Even if what Gabbe was saying wasn't true. She shuddered. Sascha started to explain, telling the truth and hoping against all hope that Gabbe wouldn't press it any further.

No such luck.

"And I'm supposed to believe that?" Gabbe nearly shouted. Mostly so the other whores could overhear, Sascha supposed. "That's the worst excuse _ever_!" In a much lower voice, she added "and don't think for even a moment that I care whether it's true or not. Vlad doesn't know about the chore schedules and a good blowjob or two will make the guards do anything I tell them to. You're screwed anyway. Unless..."

Sascha kept her expression carefully blank. Once she was sure her hatred wouldn't seep into her voice, she asked the question she already knew the answer to. "Unless what, Gabbe?"

"Unless I decide not to tell Vlad. But you'll owe me. You won't be loyal to Vlad anymore, even though you'll have to pretend to be in order to survive. You, Sascha, you will be my," Gabbe dug her fingers into Sascha's bicep as hard as possible, leaving little red half moons where her nails had cut the skin, "personal," Gabbe brought her face to within an inch of Sascha's, "_slave._"

Sascha, her teeth clamped together against the pain radiating from her arm, angrily muttered the one word she knew would mean her death. No way was she gonna let this... this bitch own her! Alexandra Anastasia Udinov was no one's slave!

"Never."

"Don't be so sure," Gabbe hissed angrily as she let go of Sascha's arm. "Vlad _will _hear of this. And with the new system..." The junkie seemed to look almost frightened. "He pulled the same thing on the girls when I came to America. Let's just say I'll have you right where I want you to be soon. On the ground, the lowest of the low, crawling, begging for mercy at his feet."

"Why?" Sascha challenged. "What makes you think I will? Is that what he made you do, Gabbe? Did you once crawl at his feet begging for mercy? Is that what has turned you into the obedient, manipulative, cruel bitch you are today?" Without giving any attention to Gabbe's face, which was filled with rage, Sascha shouldered her way past her and further into the luxurious room. The metal everywhere had been hidden, mostly, by carpets, paintings, a relatively large round window. Sascha gravitated to that window almost against her will. Daylight! Fresh air! She had missed it so much. That's what she used to love most about the forest. The cool shadows, and the fresh air, which carried the sweet scent of decaying leaves and pine needles. The way little animals could be heard scurrying out of sight, but never seen. The way sunlight, green from being filtered through the leaves, hit the ground, the light spots moving as the trees swayed with the wind. That sense of freedom she only got when running through a pile of dried leaves, scattering them everywhere, then letting herself fall down. With her arms spread and a smile on her face, she would take in the scent of the forest and look up at the leaves of the trees, far above.

That might well have been her happiest memory.

With a jolt, the voices of the girls around her brought her attention back to the room. They were staring at her. Some of them looked slightly proud of her, others just seemed freaked out or scared. All of them, though, looked extremely shocked. Apparently, someone talking back to Gabbe was a rare event. _Don't draw attention to yourself. We have to escape. _Sascha turned away from the window regretfully, lifted the heavy stack of plates from the luxurious wooden table and turned around, planning to walk straight out the door without paying attention to any of the whores gaping at her.

However, Gabbe, who had apparently recovered from the shock of Sascha hissing no then walking away, decided to start ruining Sascha's life at that moment. She was obviously aggravated by Sascha's refusal to turn into her slave. With her back turned to Gabbe, Sascha's hands clenched around the stack of plates as she heard the all-too-familiar voice.

"_Never, _you say? We'll see about that. I will ruin your life, little Sascha, and I will keep doing so until you have either grown a brain and changed your answer, or died."

The older woman stuck out her foot as Sascha turned around and caused her to fall, shattering what sounded like every plate she had been carrying. Shards of porcelain buried themselves in Sascha's forearms and her palms started to bleed immediately as she used them to stop herself from falling face first into the shards scattered all over the floor. Some pieces of glass, from the wine glass Vlad had probably been drinking from, embedded themselves in her knees. On her hands and knees in front of Gabbe, she glared at her nemesis, tears stinging her eyes from the pain. She got up as quickly as she could, trying to keep the tears from rolling down her cheeks.

"Oops," Gabbe drawled, smirking. "That was not a very smart thing to do, was it, Sascha? Didn't the guards say the plates had to be _squeaky clean? _And that you'd better not break them or you'd _suffer the consequences? _You're so clumsy, Sascha. Why'd you try and carry so much fragile stuff at once anyway?"

Rage settled over Sascha. Gabbe didn't have the right to ruin her life like this! "You," she seethed. "you did that on purpose!"

"Yes I did, honey. Now try and prove that," Gabbe hissed in a venomous tone of voice. "My word against yours? Good luck with that. I told you I'd ruin your life if you refused. Guess what? I'm starting now. Vlad will hear about this. You will be begging at my feet to protect you from him before the week is out. Mark my words."

Panic mixed with rage, fear replaced anger as Gabbe's words got through to Sascha. She knew the junkie meant it, and would follow up on the threat too. She walked past Gabbe, avoiding to look her in the eyes.

She walked out the door of Vlad's quarters, glad she had left it open when she entered. If she had needed to push it open with her torn-open hands, Sascha didn't know whether she would have had the strength to walk the short hallway without bursting into tears.

Ignoring the comments Scar Face and Pock Mark were making about her bloody appearance, the lack of plates in her hands and the yelling they had heard from the inside of Vlad's quarters, Sascha walked through the short hallway. She looked at the floor and at her feet as she walked, empty-handed, into the large room where the girls had had dinner.

"_Sascha!_"

She looked up. The twins were running in her direction, the half-dried stacks of plates forgotten. Even Oli looked concerned, although that might be because Sascha did not come back carrying the load of plates she was supposed to be getting.

As the twins reached her, Sascha recognized the pure terror in their eyes. She looked down – and noticed she looked even worse than she felt. Blood was dripping down her hands from the half dozen little wounds the shards of porcelain had cut on her arms and palms. The remainder of her jeans had been torn around her knees and stained with blood.

"What –" Ana seemed lost for words. Tanya was faring a little better. "Who did –"

Sascha gave them a bitter look. "Who do you think?" She turned to look at Oli, whose face had paled so much she looked like she might pass out. "Gabbe tripped me when I was walking with the plates. I'm sorry, Oli. If anyone asks, just tell them to find me. I never meant to get you in –"

"Shut up," Oli said in a strained sort of voice. "We have to get you to someone who knows First-Aid. You're bleeding out."

"It's not that bad," Sascha reassured the three of them. "I don't need First-Aid. Let's just go to the dormitory. The guards said they have a surprise for us, remember? A 'change in policy'."

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**Aaaand... it's done! I'd love to hear your thoughts! What do you guys think the 'change in policy' will entail? If you get it right, you get a shoutout! And of course I always welcome a review telling me whether you loved it, or hated it, and any (constructive) criticism... Everything is highly appreciated!**

**Oh, and I'll probably update soon, but everything is a bit uncertain right now. My twin sister is in the hospital after a heavy surgery on her spine. It's been four days since the surgery, and she can't sit up on the edge of her bed for more than three minutes without passing out. So, I ask your patience. Taking care of my sister is what matters most to me right now.**

**Xx Ilse**


	9. Change In Policy

**A/N: PLEASE READ**

**I had planned exactly what to write in this chapter and it was all nice and semi-innocent but somehow that warped until it became... this.  
You all be warned: this chapter should probably be rated M. With Alex/Sascha's lifestyle for the first years of her time in America, y'all can probably guess why... Bear in mind I'm not the one who's to tell you what you can or can't read, that's you.**

**That's all.**

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The four girls moved to the dorm, discussing how to best break the news that all of Vlad's plates had shattered to him, preferably in a way that wouldn't get them all killed. Sascha was in front next to Ana, Tanya right behind them. Oli brought up the rear.

"Listen, I'll just tell him it was Gabbe. He's bound to –"

"Kill you!" Tanya interrupted her. "Listen, I know I haven't been here very long, but as far as I'm concerned, telling Vlad anything that upsets him is a death sentence."

"True," Oli answered, "but bear in mind that if Gabbe tells him, Sascha will be in much more trouble than if she tells Vlad herself."

"Especially since Gabbe is trying to ruin me for not agreeing to become her personal slave."

"I know that, but you can't tell Vlad, it's too dangerous!"

"Like Gabbe isn't dangerous. Look at Sascha's arms! They're still bleeding. Speaking of, doesn't this count as proof? You wouldn't trip with an armful of plates all by yourself."

"But –"

"Tanya," Ana said, turning around to face her twin sister. "It's the only way, don't you see? This is the only way Sascha even has a chance of surviving."

They had gotten to the door of the dorm. It was too narrow to walk through two at a time, so Sascha stepped in front of Ana, opening the door.

"I guess I'll just ask Irina and Aliya what to do," she said, throwing a look over her shoulder as she stepped over the threshold. "They've been here longer than any of us, they are better able to predict how Vlad will react to –"

She gasped, stopped short. The sight before her took her breath away in horror. Some small part of her mind that was still able of conscious thought propelled her into action, shielding the doorway so Ana couldn't see what was going on. Neither could Tanya, being several inches shorter than Sascha and unable to look past her.

Then again, the girls didn't need to see it to get what was going on, Sascha guessed.

The screams coming from the girls, the groans and moans coming from the guards were probably enough to make them understand.

So were the laughter and the male voices yelling, cheering each other on.

The unmistakable sounds of screams, and crying.

The wet slapping of flesh on flesh, in time with the moans.

All the girls she had so far met and then some were in there. So were at least fifty of the guards. The guards were tearing the girls' clothes', ripping them off of them, their own pants following with not much more consideration. In the short few seconds Sascha was too paralyzed to take action, she saw girls running, trying to evade the guards milling around. She saw the girls getting caught or tripped of falling over their own feet in panic. She saw those who had fallen getting jumped by half-naked guards. She saw guards moving from girl to girl.

Her brain finally caught up with her eyes. Sascha cursed, then slammed the door shut. Praying the noise inside had been loud enough to obscure the sound from the guards, she turned around and sagged against it. Panic in her eyes, she looked at Oli, though she didn't know why. The twins just seemed too young, too innocent. She didn't want to burden them with what was going on.

Her own voice drifted to her ears, reaching her through the past. _I promise, I won't let anything happen to you. Cross my heart and hope to die. _She had made that promise, what, an hour ago? Right before they had been called out to do the dishes. _One hell of a good job you're doing there, Alexandra, _she thought bitterly.

Oli looked back at her, looking every bit as horrified as Sascha felt. Sascha realized that although her positively scrawny figure had been enough to shield the view from the twins' eyes, Oli was quite a bit taller than all three of them. She had probably gotten a good eyeful of what was going on in there before Sascha had closed the door, shutting both the sight and the horrific sounds out.

"Go," Sascha told the twins and Oli. "Turn around and go. If there's a corner you can hide in, hide there. Hide under a table, or in a hallway somewhere. Wherever. Don't let them find you or you're dead."

"What about you?" The twins looked at her, their eyes every bit as panicked as the eyes of the young zebra Sascha had seen getting killed on _National Geographic _a few months back. The filly had run for her life and kept on running until the moment the lions had been on her, ripping chunks out of her hindquarters, hanging on, dragging her down. Sascha had watched, fascinated and horror-struck, as the filly was eaten alive. She couldn't seem to turn her wide eyes away, until her Mama noticed what she was watching and angrily shut down the TV, muttering something about 'those bloody American channels'.

Sascha only had to say a few words to make the twins understand. "Irina. Aliya. They're still in there. I can't..." _leave them behind, _a voice inside her head muttered. A second, more cruel voice, perhaps that of her selfish instinct of self-preservation, argued. _Sure you can. Save yourself. Save the twins. You promised._

"Go get them. Just –" Tanya took a deep, shuddering breath. "Watch out. Those guards – what they're doing – don't –"

"I'll watch out. Don't worry about me, just _go_!" Sascha turned to face Oli. "Please," she pleaded, "keep them safe for me. Please. I promised to – Please, Oli."

The slightly chubby, tall girl nodded, her eyes gleaming with unshed tears. Sascha could see it was taking all of Oli's willpower to keep them at bay. "Don't worry. I'll keep an eye on them. And Sascha, if you see Elisa…"

"Your friend? The redhead girl you were sitting next to during dinner?"

Oli nodded the affirmative. "Please take her with you too, if you can find her. She's for me what the twins, Irina and Aliya are for you. Meanwhile I'll take care of these two."

Gratefully, Sascha nodded, assuring Oli she would try to find her friend. She waited until the three girls were around the corner, before she opened the door. She steeled her heart against the cries, built the first of what would become an uncountable amount of walls around her heart.

She turned around and plunged into the madness around her.

The dim light gave everything a nightmarish tinge. The dorm never had been lit very brightly, but it appeared at least half the lights were broken, or at the very least turned off. In any case, there was just enough light for Sascha to make sure she wouldn't trip over the clothes haphazardly strewn around. Unfortunately, however, there was barely enough light for her to be able to see the faces of those around her. It made finding her three targets that much harder and meant that she had to peer into the faces of each of the girls getting raped around her to make sure they weren't her friends – or Elisa of course.

She wandered around, keeping to the walls, staying in the shadow. Dodging the guards as best as she could, she thankfully managed to fly below their _new-victim-_radar. For now at least. After a while, she gave up peering into the crowd, trying to spot Elisa's flame red hair instead, or Irina's dyed-black curls or Aliya's, dark and curly.

Finally, she spotted Elisa and Irina. They were next to each other, oblivious to each other, or the world around them in general for that matter. It seemed the guard assaulting Elisa hadn't quite managed to get in her pants – the phrase had never before made to much sense to Sascha as it did now – but the one lying on top of Irina… He was grunting and moaning, Irina's body moving to and fro on the hard cot. Sascha wanted to punch him and scream and vomit and cry and save Irina and murder the guard and murder Vlad, preferably all at once.

For now, she just reinforced the wall around her heart and let her mind go blank. With a vacated, staring look in her eyes that would have freaked her out had she looked in a mirror, she approached the panting guar. Sascha tapped him on the shoulder, ignoring the widening of Irina's eyes at her sudden appearance.

He didn't even turn around, too busy molesting Sascha's best friend.

_Fine, _she thought. _You wanna play the game this way?_

She thought back to Yuri for a moment, silently thanking him. Yes, they had played soccer whenever her Papa was around, and grabbed the ball whenever they saw him approaching. And still, often as not they had busied themselves quite differently as soon and as long as they were alone.

Yuri had been teaching her some basic fight moves. He'd been a vivid member of the local Karate club for years, and had passed some of the basic knowledge on to Alexandra. She had adapted it a tiny bit so it was usable in street fights, and practiced on Yuri until they were both out of breath and she was straddling him as he lay squirming on the leafy ground.

Sascha struck the guard who was busy thrusting into her friend in the neck. It was hard enough a blow to finally get his attention, but not hard enough to kill or paralyze him.

The man slid out of Sascha best friend, who was left crying silently, and got up.

"What, you want some too?" he said, a malevolent grin on his face.

Sascha had her answer ready. "I'd rather not, asshole."

And with a kick to his exposed groin, she had him doubling over. She rammed one hand up under his chin, heard something crack and punched him in the stomach with her other hand, her left. The guard was out for the count, winded, blood dribbling from her mouth and cupping himself between the legs.

"Let my friend go, you son of a bitch," she told him with faked calm, shaking in barely suppressed rage.

She turned around, grabbed Irina's outstretched hand and hauled her to her feet. Moved over to the guard towering over Elisa, noticing he had only just started to undo his pants. She waited behind him quietly until they were halfway down his legs, at the height of his knees, then snapped out a hand and pulled on the crotch of his jeans. The guard fell, face first, onto the metal frame of the cot. She heard a metallic _crack _and rolled him over to reveal a trickle of blood flowing down his face. It originated from a gash above his left eye, and quickly turned from a trickle into a stream. She felt for a pulse, and heard one. _Just unconscious, then, _she thought, a smug smile gracing her lips. _Thank you, Yuri._

She grabbed one arm of each of the shell-shocked girls, and physically hauled them to the front door. "Go," she told them, flashing back to when she had said almost the exact same words to the twins and Oli. "The twins are out there somewhere, So is Oli," she added, turning in Elisa's direction. "They have hidden. Try and find them. If you can't find them, hide. Stick together, whatever happens, and don't run into any guards."

"But… What about…" Irina seemed genuinely concerned, though her eyes settled on a spot on the far wall and her voice drifted off as though she had forgotten she was even saying something.

"Aliya is still in there. I can't leave her."

"Do you want me…"

"No thanks, Irina. Just hide." Although Sascha really, _really _didn't feel like going back in there, Irina was probably in shock, as well as obviously scarred for life. She'd be more of a help than a hindrance in there, anyway.

"Want me to come?" Elisa had more of a hold on her mental health than Irina seemed to have. It probably helped that Sascha had gotten the drop on the guard before he'd actually done the dirty to Elisa.

"No, Elisa, really. Thanks a lot. But I need you to take care of Irina right now, okay?"

"Anything. You saved my… well, perhaps not my life. But at least my virginity."

"Anytime," Sascha said, and dived back into the room to find the last sheep of her herd.

This time, she was less careful, running through the screaming, panting, grunting, laughing, crying, moaning crowd. _Aliya, Aliya, Aliya, Aliya_. The name pounded through her head on the rhythm of her frantic steps.

There! Lying on her belly on a cot somewhere, her ripped, torn clothing thrown to the side, a guard on top of her with his pants undone and hanging halfway down his thighs. Sascha could hear his moans all the way from where she was standing. The wall she had thought she had built started to crack and crumble at the sight of Aliya's face, red, contorted in pain, tear-streaked from sobbing. Her head was turned to face Sascha.

_Run, _she mouthed, her panic-filled eyes locking on Sascha's even as Aliya's body was rocked to and fro by the guard's thrusts. She mouthed something else, too, something Sascha could have sworn was her name. Her _real _name. Aliya mouthed it again, trying not to draw attention to the girl she was communicating with, yet make her understand too. This time, Sascha was certain she had seen it right. But it was impossible.

Aliya had mouthed _Run, Alexandra. _

Impossible.

Aliya's eyes swiveled upward as the pretty, mocha-skinned girl passed out.

Sascha was grabbed from behind and the clothes torn from her body with a vengeance. Screaming, she fell face first on the floor, a heavy weight on top of her.

"Hello there, beautiful. You don't look like you've had your turn yet," a raspy voice panted in her ear. "The young ones are always the best."

Sascha cried into the hard metal surface of the floor as the man did all he wanted – and then some, every now and then yelling at others to stay away, that this one was his and all of them were just gonna have to wait in line. They happily did, especially after someone shouted 'Look, here, this one's still pretty fresh-looking!'

The torture ended only after what seemed like a hundred men had had their turn and Sascha passed out.

* * *

**Oh my God. I have never even written anything remotely explicit, barely even a kissing scene, and here I am writing raping scenes! ****SAY WHAT? I just reread it and can't believe I wrote this.**

**I am WAY nervous for what all of you think! Please tell me what your thoughts are in the reviews.**


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